70th Blog – "IDENTITY" by Milan Kundera

IDENTITY” by Milan Kundera is one of the most fascinating book I ever read some five to six year ago. Suggested by one of my best friend, He suggested me this book because, at that time he had been just return from France after completing his Masters. In France, one of his colleague suggested him to read this book and also suggested to keep reserve your time while reading. At that very moment he was not conscious why his friend recommended to read this book with a proper concentration and sacred heart. Besides after completion he has all the answers and need not to ask that big question “Why”?

Before going forward to describe and let know what this book about is, let me ask you a question: who are you?

“Me?” I hear and say, “Well I’m such and such, I’m this many years old, my likes include a, b, c.” Yes, that’s all well and good. I’m tremendously happy that I now know what I enjoy and how long I has been alive and what collection of syllables my parents decided to award me with my birth. But,

Let me ask you again the same question: who are you?

In reality, very few of us could answer. As demonstrated above, we can reel of list after list of facts about ourselves, we can say what we’re “like” or describe our “personality traits”. but when it comes to saying exactly who we are, many find themselves dumbfounded. It seems simple enough – of course you know yourself, you know your mind, you know where you’re from. You and you alone are the protector of your dreams, desires, hopes and fears.

I used to get rather frustrated when someone asked me who I was and then questioned my response. Listen, I felt like saying, I think I know me a bit better than you do. That was, however, before I read a book by the Franco-Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, called Identity, one of the most powerful book that I ever read, can say infinitely powerful.

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples – indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one.

But, what I want to talk about is this – “IDENTITY” - A love story, an excellently written love story of two lovers, Chantal and Jean-Marc. It follows two lovers and the occurrence of a catastrophic, yet superbly implicit, event. This event, needless to say, sets of a chain of subtle and intricate incidents. Two lovers sharing intimate moments, hopes, dreams until doubt comes in their life. “Sometimes”, writes Kundera – Perhaps only for an instant – we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own”. I was gripped from page one. But, this is not a book plug. All I will say is this: this is a book of major consequence, powerful and so well-crafted; the reader has to readjust their perspective of reality. If you haven’t read it – do read it. One of the messages of this novel is that, in order to love, you need to be certain that you know who the other person is. Once you start to doubt your lover's identity, love is crumbled. In this novel, when love starts to crumble, the lovers encounter their own secret fears. For Chantal, this means being naked, and for Jean-Marc, it means becoming a beggar. The desperation of their own fears drive them back to the safety of their relationship.

A brilliant, moving look at people and relationships. A book that holds a mirror up to us so that we question the nature of human identity, how we may come to define ourselves through others and through our partners. A short cognitive journey in which the main characters continuously sway between reality and dream. A heart-breaking book yet a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a complex journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside and what the mind creates in its own solitude.

Milan Kundera is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and forgetting, and the Joke. He writes in both Czech and French.

Regards

Dhitendra 

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